Vancouver’s Musee d’Orsay ‘Modern Woman’ exhibit an historic event

By Bill Mann

VANCOUVER, B.C. (MarketWatch) –It’s the most prestigious international show to hit Vancouver since the Winter Olympics last February. And the lines to get in “The Modern Woman: Drawings By Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Other Masterpieces from the Musee D’Orsay, Paris” have been almost as long as those into some Olympic competitions.

Many of the priceless French drawings at the downtown Vancouver Art Gallery have never before left Paris. Some have never even been displayed, for want of room at the soon-to-expand Paris home of the impressionists.

C’est dommage. There are many beautiful, colorful works here in this well-thought-out, historically significant exhibit, which runs through Sept. 6 and will appear only in Vancouver. It’s the result of five years of planning between the D’Orsay, a Paris must-see attraction, and the Vancouver gallery.

The Modern Woman, which I had the opportunity to see and savor last week, presents a unique experience in North America. Its 97 works were organized around the theme that these famed artists portrayed women as they first appeared in public, in the new modern world first emerging in Paris during the mid-19th century.

Women, formerly sequestered in their homes, were suddenly out in public, shopping or conversing in cafes — without men. Artists, who had previously portrayed women mostly as mothers — or madonnas in religious paintings – had never depicted women in such personal, intimate settings. (One room is devoted to nude drawings). The well-organized D’Orsay exhibit is a revelation in this respect.

A scandalous work

One painting that’s a gem of the exhibition, Degas’ colour-splashed “A Cafe on the Boulevard Montmartre,” caused a scandal in 1877 for brazenly depicting prostitutes in public. It also upset the talented Degas, who felt the critics and the public were focusing too much on one pastel drawing at the expense of his other paintings.

Another Degas on display in Vancouver is similar to his memorable paintings of ballerinas in Paris: “The End of the Arabesque (Dancer Bowing)” is lovely and graces the cover of the Vancouver show’s program.

You have to look closely at many of the colored canvases to confirm they’re not oil paintings. But Paul Gaugin’s drawings here (like “The Little Swineherd Sitting, Knitting”) have little or none of the color of his later, more famous paintings done in Tahiti.

“The Modern Woman” is the first-ever drawing exhibition by the D’Orsay, almost hard to believe. And it’s drawing — crowds. Olivier Simmat, the Paris museum’s Chief of International Exhibitions (a show of D’Orsay impressionist paintings recently toured the U.S.) told the Vancouver Sun recently that it’s a shame Parisians have to come all the way to Vancouver to see these history-making masterworks.

Also Don’t Miss…

Speaking of modern women, even if you can’t make the “Modern Woman” exhibit, the Vancouver gallery also has a permanent exhibit upstairs of Victoria, B.C. native Emily Carr’s paintings. Carr (1871-1945), an eccentric, pioneering female artist, is almost unknown to Americans, but she’s (deservedly) an icon in Canada, where her Georgia O’Keeffe-like paintings of Pacific Norhwest forests and First Nations villages are as noteworthy and evocative as any ever rendered.

Many of the eccentric Carr’s works are also displayed in her home town, Victoria, where she now rests in a local cemetery in a “natural” grave, sans coffin. Carr never married, living with her pet monkey for many years.